AMD researchers have published a VRAM-saving technique that leverages procedural generation techniques to eliminate the need for sending the GPU 3D geometry altogether. The GPU utilizes work graphs and mesh nodes to produce 3D-rendered trees on the fly at the LOD (Level of Detail) required for the current frame.
AMD researcher's real-time GPU tree generation system uses work graphs (w/ mesh nodes) for procedural tree generation. Without work graphs, the trees in the scene would have required 34.8 GiB of VRAM. With work graphs, only 51 KiBhttps://t.co/2YcWdOj5Lehttps://t.co/aDkZB08tks
Instead of requiring massive amounts of geometry, the only thing transferred is the code needed to generate the trees in the scene – code that is only a few kilobytes instead of megabytes or even gigabytes.
A lot of folks don’t understand how to use hiking poles on ascent/descent to their fullest potential. Those straps are more than just for looking good or to avoid dropping them – they’re for leverage and to help pull yourself up hills and ease yourself down descents. You can hike with your arms as much as your legs and save your knees.
Game audio has come a long way from the days of Pac-man. Those original games could manage some beeps and bloops from a single channel speaker. As time went on, sampled sounds and stereo allowed for more realistic material sounds and music. Then was the introduction of surround sound systems and directional effects.
Like most modern games, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild relied on a standard library of sound effects blended into the gameplay. But this would not work for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It needed a much more complex system to meld sounds together and interact anywhere in the game world. It would simply become to much work to simulate an arrow shot in all the different environments found in the game. Caves need to echo, desert sands absorb sound, and what if the arrow lands in water, or ice, or on stone? Further, all of this must be attenuated based on distance and obstructions so players can tell where things are coming from and how far away they are.
Junya Osada, the lead audio engineer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, started sharing the mechanisms of how they achieved this. They use a variety of specialized filters that were attached to informational voxel geometry under the map used to describe the environmental characteristics above it. Those voxels were used for game mechanics – and were co-oped to also help the sound. This environmental information is then combined with the players distance and direction from the sounds using their unique method to create some interesting emergent properties.
The system isn’t a full-fledged sound rendering system that has been explored before, but it’s a very interesting halfway ground from what we have today to such a system. It’s definitely worth a listen (which happens after the equally interesting talk about the physics engine):
Google ended the Hot Chips 2025 machine learning session with a detailed look at its newest tensor processing unit, Ironwood. First revealed at Google Cloud Next 25 in April 2025, Ironwood is Google’s first TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) designed primarily for large scale inference workloads – and it’s a whopper.
The architecture is incredible. It delivers 4,614 TFLOPs of FP8 performance – and eight stacks of HBM3e provide 192GB of memory capacity per chip and is paired with 7.3TB/s bandwidth. With 1.2TBps of I/O bandwidth, the system can scale up to 9,216 chips per pod without glue logic and reach a whopping 42.5 exaflops of performance. It absolutely trounces their previous TPUs.
Deployment is already underway at hyperscale in Google Cloud data centers, although the TPU remains an internal platform not available directly to customers.
Demozoo.org is a website that is a library of not only old school ’90’s era demo competition submission – but even all the recent ones as well. They have lists of current competitions and news too. An extra feature is many demos have youtube videos of the runs so you don’t have to download the binaries and run them locally.
Quantitative and qualitative feedback powers combine!
As you might expect, some of the feedback was simply changes to the balance of certain mechanics if someone felt something was too hard or a mechanic simply wasn’t being understood. But the team went beyond just that by pairing direct feedback with telemetry they were gathering.
Instead of a standard Discord channel that required managers to sift through buckets of messages to collect the few jewels, they let users make suggestions and let people crowdsource and advocate issues to see if others felt the same way. This alone helped get clearer signal over the noise. The devs went further and compared that to the metrics they gathered to see if it was true. They would track things like:
Retention rate.
Did people who played on the first day play on the second day?
How many players logged in?
How long did they play, and what was the average time played?
How far did they progress?
When the metrics were compared and combined with the active vote topics in Discord, they were able to combine quantitative analytics to the qualitative Discord feedback. If there seemed to be a point large numbers of people stopped playing, the devs could go to the forums to ask why and get qualitative feedback. This helped not only identify problems – but also get information, or even suggestions, as to how to correct them.
The idea is not new. Others have tried using metrics – and nobody probably more than the gamification methods in Duolingo. I think there is a point at which you go too far; so it’s definitely worth watching and drawing some conclusions.
Lee Williams, who you may know from bizarre-o dungeon-crawler Cryptmaster, which has over 1,100 “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on Steam, put a finer point on it: “One lesson I learned from Cryptmaster was, ‘next time, make a roguelike…’ Lots of people say they want innovation and risk-taking but it seems that very few people actually do.”
Gamesradar is reporting something Chris Zukowski says again and again – 90% of the success of your game is decided when you pick the genre. Despite wishing and hoping, the reality is that your genre makes more of a difference than how good you, or your game, is. And those preferences are fickle from year to year.
There is always lightning bolt successes like Balatro, but those games are more akin to winning the lottery. Roguelike games were absolute moneymakers 2 years ago, but in 2025 the genre is starting to slip with other categories starting to rise to the top. This is a problem when games sometimes take 2-3 years to make. It’s another reason to make games quickly and cheaply.
There’s always working on games for fun and as a personal project; but if you’re trying to actually make a living on your work, you need to be aware of market conditions.
“I applaud any indie that tries to make something new and I think that is a big strength of indies, but unfortunately that means relying on luck for whether it works out or not,” Michele Pirovano says. “I was lucky with my gamble on merging city builders and roguelikes, but maybe if I had released it a year before it would not have worked… I think that reducing the risk for indies while still being original means making smaller games to reduce dev time, and I see that advice being given often, but that however does not translate well into Steam sales, as players prefer longer and deeper games.
The Serial Port takes a popular BBS software package called Impulse and sets up an old school BBS. Bonus points that it’s available on github I used Wildcat! back in the day to set up my own BBS for a brief time.
Ars Technica reports that, researchers at security firm Binarly found that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 older device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Intel, Lenovo, Supermicro and others. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models that was compromised in 2022.
They found that more than 10% of firmware images had this vulnerability. The cure – update your bios to ones without compromised keys.
We discovered the private component of one Platform Key in a data leak where a suspected ODM employee published the source code containing the PK on a public GitHub repository. The private key was stored in an encrypted file, which was “protected” by a weak 4-character-long password and thus easily guessable with any password-cracking tool.
Wild. Besides reading my favorite Compute! magazine and typing in programs in the 80’s and 90’s, Byte magazine was the source of computer information in that era. I was pretty young, so a good bit of it went over my head, but a lot of it was fascinating.
